Notes
Notes & briefs
Primers, field manuals, and research briefs — the kind of writing that's too long to tweet and too specific to belong on a homepage.
Company Research Briefs
US Disbursement Card Systems
The rails for paying money out — benefits, insurance claims, gig earnings, refunds. Who runs the programs, why prepaid economics hinge on the Durbin exemption, and how the EBT skimming crisis and instant push-to-card rails are reshaping the fraud problem.
Canadian Challenger Fintech — Translated for a US PM
Six banks, one regulator, and an interchange model that inverts at the border. The challenger landscape (Wealthsimple, KOHO, Neo, EQ Bank, the SMB-banking wave) plus a US→Canada regulatory translation table — OSFI, FINTRAC, CDIC, RPAA, open banking.
Speak, Don't Just Understand — A 90-Day Mandarin Plan
A pinyin-first, no-characters plan built around the reflex to respond — tone drills, food & ordering vocab, and unscripted small talk, structured into three phases toward a clear 90-day target.
A Quick Primer — Pretraining, RL, Mech Interp, Harnesses
A short rundown of five overlapping ideas in modern AI — pretraining and scaling laws, reinforcement learning, mechanistic interpretability, and the harnesses that wrap a model in a loop — with first-party sources to keep reading.
Consumer Credit Risk
Lend money to strangers, get most of it back. A primer on the expected-loss decomposition, the metrics credit teams watch every morning, and where four sample lending products earn (and absorb) loss.
Weekly Progress Surface — Mocks
Phone-mirror design mocks exploring the persistent week-progress strip for Ava's Journal tab — the treatment rounds behind the shipped ambient mood cells.
Staying in Sync — Fetch, Fast-Forward & Fixing Conflicts
How to pull down someone else's changes safely, why some updates fast-forward effortlessly while others need a real merge, and exactly how to resolve a conflict when two branches edit the same lines — built around the fetch-first, inspect-before-you-act habit.
Ava — Logo Animation Concepts
Six welcome-screen animation treatments for Ava — exploring entrance choreography, fade style, and motion personality for the first thing users see at launch.